Top Highlights

• It was broad in space and shallow in time, compared to a narrow, deep war.
• Most accounts of the Spanish flu to date have focused on Europe or North America. They had to, because for a long time it was only in those places that data had been collected systematically.
• But Europe- and North America-centred accounts distort the picture for two reasons. First, those continents reported the lowest death rates, on average, so their experiences were atypical.
• War was undoubtedly the main event on that continent: France lost six times more souls to the war than to the flu, while in Germany the multiple was four, in Britain three and in Italy two.
• Palaeoclimatologists try to understand what the earth’s climate was like in the past, and why, by studying such things as sediment deposits, fossils and tree rings. Finding that the world grew cooler in the late Roman era, for example, they suggest that the Plague of Justinian–a pandemic of bubonic plague that killed approximately 25 million people...